Butterflies

I am creating a course with two butterfly points. At each point there are three or four loops. I would like condes to exhaustively generate the possible courses with different loop orders as happens with Hagebies. I can't see how to do this and have a sneaking feeling Imust be missing something obvious. Any suggestions.

Support explicitly for butterflies is an item high up on my to-do list.

In the mean time, if you want a butterfly with, say, 3 loops, you can create a relay course with 3 relay legs.

The centre control will appear four times on the course, with a fork between each appearance. Each fork will be identical, and have one of the butterfly loops in each branch.

This will generate a lot of relay variations. However, only those variations that have exactly one A, one B, and one C will be good. The rest will not be useful in this context, as they will use the same butterfly loop twice or three times.

I am aware that this is not the ideal solution, and I hope to come up with a better solution in Autumn.

Compare the following ("Cx" are common controls, "By" are butterfly controls). I have a course with a butterfly: C1 - B1 - C1 - B2 - C1 with the other half of the field doing B2 and B1 the other way round.

Your suggestion was to have 2 forks as follows (if I understood you correctly):

C1 - [B1 | B2] - C1 - [B1 | B2 ] - C1

which generates 4 options with AB and BA as the useful ones (AA and BB not).

I unrolled this a bit and got:

C1 - [B1 C1 B2 | B2 C1 B1] - C1

Which only gave me the 2 options which was what I wanted.

An analogous setup also works for a diamond/lozenge butterfly with:C1 - [B1 C2 C1 B2 | B2 C2 C1 B1] - C2 (if you see what I mean)

This works great except for the following:1. I get control codes not control numbers on the main display (at least after doing the first Print Preview)2. While I can reposition the control numbers for one of the loop options in the Lozenge/diamond option, I can't do it for both parts - so the control number sticks in a default place where it is hard to read.

Currently, each course can store only one position for the control number / control code for a given control.

I have noted your request to be able to position control numbers independently on each variation.

I need to figure out a flexible way of configuring this. I have another request to fix control numbers for a given control across all courses. So a solution needs to support both of these - somewhat opposite paradigms.

Maybe for any B/C/D options it could use the placing of the number from the all-controls map rather than choose its own default location? That would be simpler than providing an interface to amend multiple versions of a control.

BTW I have used my above amended version and it works fine. Only options AB, AA, BA and BB are produced and luckily the numbers are in a reasonable position.

Event is this w/e! And I have a 2-winged butterfly and a diamond/lozenge style one too without having to duplicate the course N times - so this has been managed perfectly by the technique above.

One other thing I noticed was for Score events. In normal O it is conventional for the start triangle to "point" to the 1st control. In your Score courses it points to the control with the lowest value code. It might look better if it just pointed North instead since leaving it at an oblique angle looked a bit weird. I have fixed that on mine by finding the kite that is closest to N (or a control that is slightly S of either W or E) of the Start triangle to give it that shape!

What event management software are you using? When I export butterfly courses that use course variations, OE2010 and Ór seem to ignore the variations and simply treat it as a single course, whereas Autodownload recognises the variations as individual courses. I'm curious to know whether OE and Ór recognise one of the course variations as a valid course.

Erm, good question - I think last year we used separate courses for each variant and it worked fine (although to be honest AD couldn't tell whether the person had done the variant they were supposed to, but it was only a local event so no big shakes).

Our IT guy has been working on the files we gave him so I'll send him your question and get back to you with an answer.

If you have more than one course with variations, the most recent release of AD will prefix the variation with the course name. Older versions of AD simply adopted the variation name as the course name, thus resulting in confusion.

Normal Butterflies are OK in the latest version of AD, but not the clam-shell type.

So a control order of...A-B-C-A-D-E-A-...is fine

But...A-B-C-A-D-C...is not.

BUT we managed OK with only one version of the Condes file - we exported the individual course xml files and that worked for AD. I think RouteGadget also needed these separate course files and we ended up with 4 variants to have to choose from.

Condes worked great though - so thanks a lot, bar a couple of minor things it works fine.

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